When he [Ward Cunningham] was on his honeymoon in Hawaii thirteen years earlier, he remembered, “the airport counter agent directed me to take the wiki wiki bus between terminals.” When he asked what it meant, he was told that wiki was the Hawaiian word for quick, and wiki wiki meant superquick. So he named his Web pages and the software that ran them WikiWikiWeb, wiki for short. – From Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators
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When he [Jimmy Wales] was three, his mother bought a World Book Encyclopedia from a door-to-door salesman; as he learned to read, it became an object of veneration... But Wales soon discovered that the World Book had shortcomings: no matter how much was in it, there were many more things that weren’t… After a few years, there were all sorts of topics—moon landings and rock festivals and protest marches, Kennedys and kings—that were not included. World Book sent out stickers for owners to paste on the pages in order to update the encyclopedia, and Wales was fastidious about doing so. “I joke that I started as a kid revising the encyclopedia by stickering the one my mother bought.”
This month is the 17th anniversary of the launch of Wikipedia. Although often maligned, Wikipedia, is a vision of what we can achieve. Walter Isaacson explains why in The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, And Geeks Created the Digital Revolution – a history of computers and the web. Isaacson:
Wales next tried an idea that reflected his childhood love of the World Book: an online encyclopedia. He dubbed it Nupedia, and it had two attributes: it would be written by volunteers, and it would be free.
“We wish editors to be true experts in their fields and (with few exceptions) possess Ph.Ds.,” the Nupedia policy guidelines stipulated.
After a year, Nupedia had only about a dozen articles published, making it useless as an encyclopedia, and 150 that were still in draft stage, which indicated how unpleasant the process had become. It had been rigorously engineered not to scale.
Wales launched a sister online encyclopedia named Wikipedia. Isaacson:
One month after Wikipedia’s launch, it had a thousand articles, approximately seventy times the number that Nupedia had after a full year. By September 2001, after eight months in existence, it had ten thousand articles. That month, when the September 11 attacks occurred, Wikipedia showed its nimbleness and usefulness; contributors scrambled to create new pieces on such topics as the World Trade Center and its architect…
By March 2003 the number of articles in the English-language edition had reached 100,000, with close to five hundred active editors working almost every day. At that point, Wales decided to shut Nupedia down…
As it grew organically, with both its content and its governance sprouting from its grassroots, Wikipedia was able to spread like kudzu. At the beginning of 2014, there were editions in 287 languages, ranging from Afrikaans to Žemaitška. The total number of articles was 30 million, with 4.4 million in the English-language edition.
How is this possible? The Wiki software allowed anyone to contribute or modify the website. Isaacson:
But the software kept track of every version. If a bad edit appeared, the community could simply get rid of it by clicking on a “revert” link. “Imagine a wall where it was easier to remove graffiti than add it” is the way the media scholar Clay Shirky explained the process. “The amount of graffiti on such a wall would depend on the commitment of its defenders.” In the case of Wikipedia, its defenders were fiercely committed.
Why do people contribute and edit? Isaacson:
We all have our little joys, such as collecting stamps or being a stickler for good grammar, knowing Jeff Torborg’s college batting average or the order of battle at Trafalgar. These all find a home on Wikipedia.
Why make a such a fuss over Wikipedia? Isaacson:
A key principle of Wikipedia was that articles should have a neutral point of view. This succeeded in producing articles that were generally straightforward, even on controversial topics such as global warming and abortion. It also made it easier for people of different viewpoints to collaborate. “Because of the neutrality policy, we have partisans working together on the same articles,” Sanger explained. “It’s quite remarkable.” The community was usually able to use the lodestar of the neutral point of view to create a consensus article offering competing views in a neutral way. It became a model, rarely emulated, of how digital tools can be used to find common ground in a contentious society.
Hmmm. Say again?
The community was usually able to use the lodestar of the neutral point of view to create a consensus article offering competing views in a neutral way. It became a model, rarely emulated, of how digital tools can be used to find common ground in a contentious society.
How about you? What would you add to Wikipedia? Share a story.
Other books by Walter Isaacson include Steve Jobs, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and the current best seller Leonardo da Vinci
